getting rid of py27-nose @1.2.1_1 and gmp @5.0.5_0

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 10, 2013, at 05:40, Federico Calboli <f.calboli at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10 Dec 2013, at 11:28, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>>> I have thus far failed to get rid of them, and get rid of any leftover crud left by their configuration.  I'd be obliged if someone could tell how to do that -- I like to run a tight ship.
>> 
>> You can uninstall them this way:
>> 
>> sudo port uninstall gmp @5.0.5_0 py27-nose @1.2.1_1
>> 
>> Or if you want to get rid of all inactive ports you can use:
>> 
>> sudo port uninstall inactive
> 
> That worked, and seems reasonably obvious -- enough at least to make me feel quite stupid for not having figured it out myself.

Don’t worry; we have too many different sources of documentation and it’s hard to keep up with them all. “inactive” is what we call a pseudo-portname, which evaluates to a set of ports that can vary based on your installation. Other pseudo-portnames that do what they sound like include “all”, “active”, “installed”, “outdated”, “requested”, and “unrequested”. Pseudo-portnames are documented in the port(1) manpage.

You can use these pseudo-portnames with any MacPorts commands where you would use actual port names, though some pseudo-portnames fit better with some commands than others. For example it’s unlikely you’d want to install all 17,000+ ports with “sudo port install all”, however you might want to clean all ports with “sudo port clean all”. Using the “installed” pseudo-portname with the “installed” command (“port installed installed”) is redundant, but using the “actinact” pseudo-portname with it (“port installed actinact”) can be informative (shows you ports you’ve installed that have both an active and at least one inactive version).

Another interesting pseudo-portname is “leaves”, which is the set of ports that were both not requested by you and are not needed by any other port; these are often good candidates for uninstalling (with “sudo port uninstall leaves”). Note two caveats:

* Leaves include build dependencies. So even if a port is not required to run a port, it may be required to build it, so next time you upgrade a port it may need to reinstall such build dependencies.

* Programs or libraries installed by some ports may inadvertently link to libraries they shouldn’t. This would be a bug, but MacPorts is not free of bugs. It is possible that a program you use has inadvertently linked with a library that is a leaf; uninstalling that leaf would cause the program to fail because it cannot find the library. If you encounter this situation, please file a bug report so that we can decide how to fix it: either by adding a dependency on the opportunistically-linked library, or by forcing the program not to use the library.